Open thread for night owls: Ehrenreich on how the #MeToo movement is making male power look silly
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At The Baffler, Barbara Ehrenreich writes—Patriarchy Deflated: SOMETIMES IT TAKES A SLOVENLY ALT-RIGHT “STRATEGIST” to put things in proper historical perspective. In a recent chat with a journalist, Steve Bannon called the #MeToo movement an “antiOpen thread for night owls: Ehrenreich on how the #MeToo movement is making male power look silly
At The Baffler, Barbara Ehrenreich writes—Patriarchy Deflated: SOMETIMES IT TAKES A SLOVENLY ALT-RIGHT “STRATEGIST” to put things in proper historical perspective. In a recent chat with a journalist, Steve Bannon called the #MeToo movement an “anti-patriarchy movement” that is “going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.” That much is true. But the implication that patriarchy is somehow the same as civilization gets more implausible with every me-too revelation. We have been encouraged to think of patriarchy as a solemn undertaking, a millennia-old system designed to keep women down and young men from getting out of line. Its favorite notions, over the centuries, have been Honor, Tradition, Power, and Glory. Its material manifestations range from pyramids to skyscrapers, from the simple lines of ancient Greek temples to the neoclassical architectural majesty of nineteenth-century European capitals. It accessorizes its most hallowed rituals with columns of uniformed soldiers and stirring martial music. The Naked and the Daft But how silly patriarchy is looking at this moment, as one rich and powerful man after another falls victim to the #MeToo movement. We’ve learned that the fatuous centrist Charlie Rose, whose wardrobe includes Versace slacks, liked to swan around among his female office staff in the nude, as did the deep-closeted casino billionaire Steve Wynn. Matt Lauer, whose job was to lend gravitas to the Today show, kept a bag full of sex toys in his office, so he’d have something to play with should he manage to lure a young woman in. The president of the most powerful nation in the world, it has been alleged, employed prostitutes to pee on a Moscow hotel bed and enjoyed being spanked with a copy of Forbes magazine featuring his likeness on the cover. Feminists have, of course, seen through the clouds of glory trailing patriarchy to expose its intrinsic cruelty and violence. But one thing we have seldom questioned is its seriousness. Consider the feminist dictum that rape is not about sex, but power. The rapist isn’t having fun; he’s simply enforcing the age-old power of men. That is, he’s doing a kind of work—a service to the other elite men who are his peers. Sex, and hence the possibility of pleasure, at least for men, seldom enters into the feminist discourse on male violence, which has treated rape and sexual assault as an enactment of male domination, and perhaps a necessary warning to women—a kind of public service announcement. But the mounting accusations of sexual harassment by powerful men suggest that feminism has been taking patriarchy a bit too seriously. Maybe it’s not about the endless reproduction of power relationships; maybe it’s about guys just having fun. Out of sight of nannies and governesses and wives, they are stealing treats. One of the accusers of Hillary Clinton’s lecherous former “faith consultant” says he looked at her “like she was a snack”—not a person or even a pretty girl but a handy between-meals treat. Certainly Harvey Weinstein treated women this way, hiring a pimp disguised as a colleague to line up women in the foreign cities he visited so that the great mogul would never have to go without sustenance. The sheer entitlement on display here puts one in mind of Newt Gingrich’s statement that he feels like “a happy four-year-old who gets up every morning hoping to find a cookie.” [...] TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES QUOTATION “The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.” ~~William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2005) TWEET OF THE DAY xThis is a blatant, dangerous attack on @PPFA. Millions of Americans rely on Planned Parenthood as a primary health care provider. This move wonâÂÂt do anything to decrease abortions, but it will 100% punish those patients who depend on PP for care. https://t.co/LcHysX88gC— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) May 18, 2018 BLAST FROM THE PAST On this date at Daily Kos in 2003—War is a force that gives us meaning: Chris Hedges’ new book, War is a force that gives us meaning, is not a memoir, but a remembrance of his years as a war correspondent. There are no great confessions or revelations, but an honest exploration of what war brings to us. In the wake of 9/11, his book is especially powerful, since he shows how the state becomes the religion of the people in wartime, how nationalism subverts honesty and common sense. Our inability to respond to Al Qaeda in a meaningful way comes from this impulse to bolster the state in time of war, to embrace the myths of heroic violence. A myth slowly and surely coming undone in Iraq. Heroism, embraced on the thinest of pretexts, is now being revealed as sham and artifice. War is an odd and cruel beast. It changes everything around you even if you don't notice it. We now chase our tails trying to trap Saddam, hunt him down and contain him, while his myth only grows stronger. The Saudis are not going to track down Al Qaeda any more than you're going to build a cathedral in Medina. It's no contest. The odds are high, if you asked, the most popular Saudi in Saudi Arabia is Osama, not the king or his sons. Too much would be revealed by an honest accounting of AQ and the Saudi government. Hedges talks of how everything is perverted in war, but the one thing he didn't mention was the encouragement of illusions.[…] On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Multiple shootings this morning, though we didn't yet know which would become the more significant. Cohen SARs/bribe update. Trump-China bribe update. Kushner-Qatar bribe update. Weekend reading, in case you thought something wasn’t FUAB. x Embedded Content RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!) LINK TO DAILY KOS STORE Read more